Hit by a car
I was about a quarter of the way across a quiet residential street. A woman driving a brown sedan came down the street I was crossing and stopped at the stop sign. She was a car-length past the line for the stop sign, but not yet into the intersection. She looked up and down the street she was about to cross. I was about ten feet away from the driver side window when she came to a stop. She paused a good long time while looking, so it appeared she was yielding to me. I continued across the street.
I was, by this point, in front of her car. While looking around, she must have somehow failed to notice the large man wearing the bright orange reflectorized jacket. She stepped on the gas, and I fell on her hood to avoid having my knees snapped.
She did not touch the breaks. She simply threw her hands up and let the car roll slowly into the intersection. This is probably the right thing to do if you hit someone at low speed. If you slam on the brakes, you'll toss them off the hood and in front of your car.
I got up on my elbow and looked at her to see what her reaction was. She looked like she was scared shitless. She was about 50 or 60 years old, with short hair in little curls. She had reading glasses on a string around her neck. I did not feel like lecturing someone's grandmother about sharing the road, so I got off her hood and walked away. After sitting in the intersection for twenty or thirty seconds, she drove away.
It occurs to me that people in Los Angeles simply do not look for pedestrians. It is so fantastically unlikely that you will ever encounter anyone proceeding on foot that people forget to take the possibility into account. One is as likely to encounter a unicorn as a pedestrian when motoring in quiet residential neighborhoods. The lady was definitely being cautious. She paused at the stop light for a good long time, and carefully looked each way several times. However, she was just looking for other cars. It must have completely slipped her mind that she ought to look for things other than cars.
Of course, if she had stopped behind the line, she probably would have seen me. That is why they put the line where it is. However, from behind the line, she could not have safely looked down the intersecting street. In such circumstances, you are supposed to stop twice: Once to look for pedestrians (and obey the stop sign), and once to check for cars. Sometimes you can do both at once, but not always.
Modern roads really are a curious invention. Contrary to most people's assumptions, our roads do not exist to allow people to move quickly. It would be simpler (and probably cheaper) to design vehicles that can drive fast without the expense and complexity of a road. The US Army has lots and lots of such vehicles. The problem is that such vehicles are extremely dangerous, which is why we only use them for weapons.
The reason why they are dangerous is that they must be used under complex conditions. The desert basins of Southern California are ideal territory for tanks. However, very few people can safely operate a tank under any circumstances. Safely operating a tank among pedestrians, pets, houses, gardens, mailboxes, fireplugs and wildlife is probably an impossible task.
So, we build roads. Modern roads exist to minimize complexity. This allows drivers to operate on a smaller set of assumptions. This is probably the only reason that most normal people are able to drive at all. I consider myself to be a pretty safe driver, but I know that I don't have the skill, attentiveness and reaction time needed to safely operate a tank in a populated area. If I had to move a tank across Los Angeles, I would would disassemble it and carry each piece in a pickup truck.
No matter how carefully we design our roads, they are a fiction. The real world is too complicated for people to safely drive a vehicle at 25 miles an hour, so we have invented a simpler world where it is safe. Los Angeles is exceedingly good at this. Our roads are logical, the signs are large and easy to read, the lanes are carefully marked, and the stop signs and crosswalks are thoughtfully placed. Unfortunately, the real world always has a way of impinging on our carefully constructed fiction. Unfortunately, the bits of the real world that include cats, dogs and small children do not stand much of a chance against 3000 pound steel projectiles. It is especially alarming when you realize that these projectiles are controlled by people who have just barely enough skill to safely navigate in an imaginary cartoon universe where cats, dogs and small children do not exist.
Evidently, pedestrians in crosswalks are fading out of the fictional world in which ordinary people must live in order to operate a motor vehicle. This is a very scary thought, and it doesn't say anything good at all about Our Fair City.
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